Bill Clinton Was No Champion of the Poorby Paul Street
www.dissidentvoice.org
September 29, 2005

"We Had a Different Policy"

It's interesting to
see former Democratic President William Jefferson Clinton speaking for the
poor and against those who would distribute wealth yet further upward in
America. Two Saturdays ago, Clinton told ABC News that "you can't have an
emergency plan that works if it only affects middle-class people and up
and when you tell people to do something they don't have the means to do
you're going to leave the poor out." Clinton added that Tropical Storm
Katrina pointed up steep "class division[s] that often play out along
racial lines" in America.

Before making these
comments, Clinton reminded ABC that poverty fell in the United States
(U.S.) during his presidency. As Clinton knows, American poverty has risen
during every single year of the George W. Bush presidency -- the first
time that the nation's official deprivation gauge has gone up for five
consecutive years.

The White House was
so stung by Clinton's comments that Bush spokesman Scott McClellan was
compelled to make a curiously reflective announcement. "There is a deep
history of injustice that has led to poverty and inequality" in the U.S.,
McClellan noted, "and it will not be overcome instantly."

By Clinton's
accurate account, Bush's "real results for real Americans" have included
the redistribution of money and wealth from real lower and middle-class
Americans to really rich Americans.

"Whether it's
race-based or not," Clinton told ABC, "if you give tax cuts to the rich
and hope everything turns out alright and poverty goes up and it
disproportionately affects brown and black people, that's a consequence of
the action made. That's what they did in the 80s; that's what they've done
in this decade." "In the middle," Clinton reflected, "we had a different
policy." (Phillip Shenon, "the Ex-President: Clinton Levels Sharp
Criticism of the President's Relief Effort," New York Times, 19
September 2005, A17).

How "Different?"

Fair enough on
Reagan and the two Bushes. But how "different" and more socio-economically
and therefore (by Clinton's analysis) racially democratic was
administration policy under Bill Clinton, the self-appointed post-Katrina
champion of the poor? By Clinton's account, McClellan's "deep history of
injustice" was under egalitarian federal assault during the years of the
Clinton regime. The record suggests otherwise.

What emerges from a careful reading of these
and numerous other texts and sources is a Clinton administration that
defied mainstream public support for socially democratic policies by
conducting the public business in regressive accord with the interrelated
neoliberal and racially disparate imperatives of empire and inequality.

Clinton's domestic
agenda was first announced as a gigantic jobs-creation program coupled
with a determined effort to guarantee health care for all. But, Zinn
notes, Clinton quickly betrayed these declared campaign priorities by
"concentrating on reduction of the deficit, which under Reagan and Bush I
had left a national debt of $4 trillion." This emphasis, Zinn argued,
"meant that there would be no bold programs of expenditures for universal
health care, education, child care, housing, the environment, the arts, or
job creation." Clinton's "small gestures" toward social democracy did "not
come close to what was needed in a nation where one-fourth of the children
lived in poverty; where homeless people lived on the streets in every
major city; where women could not look for work for lack of child care;
where the air, the water were deteriorating dangerously."

More than being
merely inadequate to the needs of America's millions of truly
disadvantaged citizens, the Clinton administration actually attacked the
disproportionately non-white poor in numerous interrelated ways. Clinton
signed a punitive neoliberal welfare "reform" bill that ended the federal
government's guarantee of financial help to impoverished families with
dependent children. By forcing poor families getting federal cash
assistance (such families were mainly non-white single-parent units) to
find employment without establishing concomitant government programs to
create or directly provide livable wage jobs, Clinton flooded the nation's
low- and poverty-wage and no-benefits job market with hundreds of
thousands of defenseless new proletarians. He also scored points with the
grinders of the poor by taking welfare benefits away from legal as well as
illegal immigrants.

It was all done in
the name of "Personal Responsibility," "Work Opportunity," and
"Reconciliation," to use the key Orwellian phrases of the Clinton-Gingrich
welfare-elimination regime.

Clinton
enthusiastically signed a "Crime Bill" that expanded federal prison
construction, helping turn the "land of freedom" into the world's leading
incarceration state. Poor blacks made up a wildly disproportionate number
of the Clinton era's massive and expanding army of prisoners and
felony-marked "ex-offenders".

Meanwhile, Clinton
increased economic insecurity in poor and working-class American
communities by signing the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).
NAFTA destroyed tens of thousands of American industrial jobs by tearing
down long-established regulatory barriers to the movement of corporate
capital and commodities across the U.S.-Mexican border.

Clinton claimed that
"the era of big government is over." He was more than content, however,
to sustain funding for the regressive, repressive, and militaristic "right
hand of the state." His concern with balanced budgets did not extend to
the prison- and military- industrial complexes. As Zinn notes, Clinton's
federal government "continued to spend at least $250 billion a year to
maintain the military machine." Clinton "accept[ed] the Republican claim
that the nation must be ready to fight two regional wars simultaneously,
despite the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989."

It was only the left
hand of the state, the part that serves the poor and non-affluent
majority, that Clinton targeted in his quest for deficit reduction.

"The Traumatized Worker"

Ironically (or
fittingly) given its insistence on throwing poor people onto the mercies
of the "free" labor market, where most Americans obtain (uniquely among
industrialized states) their health insurance, the Clinton administration
ended without any serious effort to meaningfully deliver on its initial
health insurance promises. It also failed to advance any meaningful
initiative to protect the beleaguered rights of workers or to increase the
woefully inadequate minimum wage. "Both the average wages for
non-supervisory workers and the earnings of those in the lowest 10 percent
of wage earners," notes Robert Pollin, "not only remained well below those
of the Nixon/Ford and Carter administrations, but were actually lower than
that even than those of the Reagan/Bush years. Moreover, wage inequality
-- as measured by the ratio of the 90th to the 10th wage decile --
increased sharply during Clinton's tenure in office, even relative to the
Republican heyday of the 1980s." To make matters worse, the percentage of
Americans living at or below the poverty level during the Clinton
administration (13.2) was only minimally smaller than the corresponding
statistic for the Reagan/Bush era (14.1). The circumstances of the
officially "poor" population actually worsened under Clinton. This partly
reflected the Clinton administration's neoliberal slashing of federal
family cash assistance for jobless single mothers and its related reliance
on the capitalist labor market to improve the conditions of society's most
vulnerable.

As Pollin shows,
following the testimony of Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, the
leading explanation for the exceptionally low level of wage growth that
occurred even amidst a tightening labor market during the 1990s was the
reluctance of workers to demand higher incomes. This reluctance emerged
from the weakness of labor's bargaining power in an increasingly global
economy where employers widely and quite credibly threaten to close their
shops and relocate if workers voted to unionize. It also emerged from the
neoliberal pro-corporate-globalization stance of the Clinton
administration, which did virtually nothing to enhance workers' bargaining
power vis-à-vis business, thereby making it certain that the "traumatized
[American] worker" (as Greenspan described American working people to
Congress in 1997) would accept historically minor wage increases during
the 1990s boom.

"Putting People First?"

Clinton's heralded
fiscal transformation (from deficit to surplus) was achieved only at
extraordinary public cost. The single leading factor behind this
transformation, Pollin shows, was neither faster economic growth nor the
Clinton administration's modest reversal of massive Reagan-Bush tax cuts
for the wealthy, but the significant reduction of federal government
spending as a percentage of American GDP from 22% in 1992 to 18% in 2000.
While post-Cold war cuts in military spending explained part of this
reduction, a bigger share came through significant declines in federal
spending on education, poverty-reduction, environmental protection,
economic regulation, and equity promotion -- all while wealth exploded at
the top and the "poverty gap" (the amount of money required to bring all
poor people exactly up to the official poverty line) rose from $1,538 to
$1,620 from 1993 to 1999. At the same time, Pollin notes, the U.S.
military budget remained "more than the amount spent by all the rest of
NATO plus Russia, plus all the countries in the Middle East and North
Africa, including Israel, combined."

Finally, the
significant, albeit limited and uneven, economic expansion that occurred
under Clinton was purchased against the future. It was fueled primarily
by an inherently tenuous, debt-financed stock market bubble that fueled
primarily upper class consumption and which inevitably burst, with
recessionary consequences passed on to the presidency of Bush II. The
dramatic and dangerous over-escalation of stock prices could have been
stemmed with elementary regulatory measures the Clinton administration
refused to undertake because of its allegiance to neoliberal prescriptions
against government intervention in the workings of the supposed "free
market" to limit the excesses of private economic elites.

This performance
made a mockery of Clinton's 1992 campaign slogan, "Putting People First,"
which communicated a populist message Clinton rapidly abandoned once he
attained the White House, and his Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin (former
head of Goldman Sachs) reminded him that extremely wealthy folks are the
people who matter most when it comes to running the country. Even before
Rubin's reminder, however, Clinton was a veteran of the Republican-light
Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), formed to increase the influence of
big business and reduce the influence of labor and other progressive
forces within the Democratic Party. The Clinton Democrats’ basic
commitment to business-class neoliberal values poisoned the 2000
presidential election, when Al Gore could see nothing better to do with
Clinton's federal surplus than to pay down the national debt even as
nearly 700,000 African-American children lived in "deep poverty" (at less
than half of the nation's notoriously inadequate poverty level) and
beyond.

Beyond Centrist-Democratic Snakeoil

You can't blame Clinton for trying to help
his wife and his party make some pseudo-populist political hay out of the
Bush administration's pathetic performance before and during Tropical
Storm and Societal Failure Katrina. Clinton has always had a strong sense
of when to push populist buttons and when (more commonly) to return to
standard corporate-neoliberal rostrums. Since he does in fact come (as he
told ABC News) "out of an environment with a disproportionate amount of
poor people," he's always been more genuinely comfortable around the sort
of non-affluent people that tend to make the aristocratic Bush clan wince.
Still, Americans who wish to substantively overcome McClellan's "deep
history of injustice" would do well to remember that the sociopolitical
construction of American inequality is a richly bipartisan affair. Real
solutions will require dedicated activism against reactionary agents of
class and race privilege within both wings of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce
Party. They will not emerge from the superficially populist rhetoric of
past American presidents, no matter how accurate those ex-presidents'
critical take on current Republican policy.